What Poet/Editor E.Ethelbert Miller Says About The Poets

For followers and believers in Black poetry, the Bomani name appears frequently in a number of anthologies: Fertile Ground, Dark Eros, and 360 A Revolution of Black Poets.I’ve always enjoyed reading their short poems. Bomani poems can be short darts or maybe what a recent generation might call Scuds. The reader is left without radar and is helpless when a small explosion goes off in one’s head.

i have been in debt
since birth when mama put the
phone bill in my name

In the above tercet Nadir Bomani crushes splinters of blue glass into a fine dust. A child is born into a world that is not his making. His inheritance is an unpaid phone bill. The question has always been what does America owe the black man? In Bomani’s poem the reader wonders who the mother has been calling. Long-distance calls to relatives? A husband who left? Is the phone bill placed in the child’s name to avoid the bill collectors?And what about the rent? In the short poem by Nadir one can hear the survival music of the blues.The interior of the African American home, the family and the changing community are the themes one will always recognize under the name Bomani. How does the world collapse on Black people and we still find a way out of no way to celebrate life? Leave it to the poets to gather insight and strength from even how we fix our hair. When I was editing Beyond the Frontier I discovered this “curler” of a poem by Mawiyah:

there is a revolution
brewing
within my hair
and that’s
no lye

Mawiyah leaves one chuckling. The poem works like an old joke one never gets tired of hearing. Mawiyah moves us beyond the frontier with her gem of a poem “tam nguyen.”It’s a long poem with a narrative that touches on values, race, inter-racial love, and changing demographics within the American society. Written in the voice of a Vietnamese woman the poem confronts the growing interaction between Asian Americans and African Americans. Mawiyah writes like an insider. This poem is so good it could become a red light for other poets to stop writing.

Nadir however sits in with Mawiyah like he was Lester Young hanging with Billie Holiday. He is the father talking about raising children. He also speaks for those children who never make it out of childhood. Langston and King are still dreamers. We have yet to wake from the slumber of oppression. It’s a deep sleep and poets like Nadir reminds me of those type of men who followed Garvey and maybe sold newspapers for Elijah.I expect good things to keep coming out of New Orleans. Nothing but saints down there.They keep marching. The best thing we can do is follow. Beat that drum Bomani. Both of you. Don’t let anyone ban you’re drum. Our ancestors are listening in Congo Square. They hear you. Your love for each other will always give birth to poems. There is brightness in the dark. Your work gives me hope.

E. Ethelbert Miller